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30 Day Challenge: Making Mornings Productive

Hopefully, last month’s Digital Cleansing Challenge helped you unplug and get good quality sleep at night. Now that you’re waking up refreshed and don’t have the digital distractions to consume your morning, it is time to work on a 30 Day Challenge of Making Mornings Productive.

Here are a few small changes that can make a big difference in your morning routine and pave way to a productive and healthy day.

Set the alarm for 30 minutes earlier

Our excuse for avoiding things that we should be doing is always the same- not having enough time. Thirty minutes in the morning can make a whole world of difference. Wake up earlier and use that extra time to do something productive; eat breakfast, take a walk or practice that cat-eyeliner that always goes wrong! And remember to switch to an actual alarm clock not your cell-phone.

Let there be light!

First thing you should do when you get out of bed is open your curtains and let the morning light flood in. Changing the room’s atmosphere from dark to bright and fully-lit is a cue to your body that it’s day now.

Make your bed

Making your bed means officially parting with it. With an unmade bed, you would find yourself crawling back in with a laptop in no time. So fluff those pillows, straighten the sheets and throw a couple of decorative cushions so that you don’t have the heart to mess up that beauty again! Making your bed hardly takes 5 minutes and there’s a clean and organized space to welcome you when you get back from work.

Workout

Endless hours of staring at a computer screen are bound to give you a stiff neck. A few minutes of workout in the morning will keep the joints mobile and improve circulation (now you know why it is important to set the alarm earlier!) Bonus point; you’d get that healthy glow that not even the best facials can give you!

Eat breakfast

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day and so many of us have made it a habit to skip it or at best, to eat something later. Not only would a healthy breakfast keep you energized and hydrated all day, but planning something fun to eat the night before will motivate you to get out of bed early. Those extra thirty minutes should be enough for you to prepare a meal but you can make it easier still, by preparing the ingredients the night before.

Do what you hate the most first

While the routine on weekdays doesn’t change much, weekends are all yours. What is it that you hate doing the most? Doing the laundry, dealing with bills or cleaning above the kitchen cabinets? We all have something that we dread but avoiding that pesky task is not going to be of any help. Start right away with it and once you are done, the whole day is yours to enjoy!

Create a morning ritual

Choose something you love and make it a habit to do it every morning (or at least on weekends). It can be reading a few pages of a book, writing in a dream journal or watering the plants. A morning ritual is another effective way to tell yourself the day has begun and there is no more going back to the bed.

Are there any other steps that help you make your mornings more productive? Share them with us in the comments below.

Appreciate this very much. The simple things! Am a big driver of trying to do the ‘little’ things, and the big things will thus fall into place usually. This is also very practical. No need to jump through flaming hoops [!] or do anything else. Everyone can do this, which is awesome. Way to go.

I try doing everything written in the challenges myself before I write them here and they’ve had a very positive impact on my life. I’m so happy to know you like them too and are following along. Thank you for your feedback. )